Bay Area green grub for St. Patty's Day

March 17, 2010 6:55:01 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO --

St. Patrick's Day means the Bay Area is awash in a sea of green: green clothes, green jewelry, green hair dye. But if green garb just isn't enough, a few spots around the Bay Area are offering green-colored menu items to make eating a little more festive.

One of the more popular of these is the Shamrock Shake, which McDonald's offers at a limited number of restaurants for the month of March.

An employee at the McDonald's restaurant on Bayshore Avenue in San Francisco said that the only store she knew of in the area selling the elusive Shamrock Shake today is the location at 235 Front St. in the city, where a St. Patrick's Day block party was in progress this afternoon. No one from that McDonald's location could be reached for comment.

Frog Hollow Farm Cafe at the Ferry Building was offering an avocado milkshake but has sold-out of it for today, according to manager Mark Benedetto. He explained that the milkshakes can be dairy or non-dairy, and that the taste is, "luscious, without being heavy."

For green dessert, Sugar Butter Flour in Sunnyvale offers a green velvet cake-- a take on the usual red velvet cake. But it has to be ordered ahead of time, according to a representative at the restaurant.

To wash it all down, McCormick & Kuleto's Seafood Restaurant in San Francisco is offering mint martinis and green beer until closing. Other Bay Area bars serving green beer include Cato's Ale House in Oakland and Shamrock Irish Pub in Alameda.

Savvy Sellar Wines in Redwood City is hosting a green wine tasting today, but the "green" wine is not physically green, explains spokesman Joel Kampse. Rather, Savvy Sellar Wines is working with a more interpretive version of the word: some wines are organic, others have green labels.

Kampse said they could, hypothetically, put green food coloring in the wine, but they aren't planning on it. "I don't know if people want to drink green wine," he said.